page_title: J. Howard Moore
section_title: Death
hierarchical_section_title: J. Howard Moore / Death
caption_attribution_description: English: Taken during the Chicago World's Fair in 1893
context_page_description: John Howard Moore was an American zoologist, philosopher, educator and socialist. He advocated for the ethical consideration and treatment of animals and authored several articles, books, essays and pamphlets on ethics, vegetarianism, humanitarianism and education. He is best known for his work The Universal Kinship, which advocated for a secular sentiocentric philosophy he called the doctrine of "Universal Kinship", based on the shared evolutionary kinship between all sentient beings.
context_section_description: On June 17, 1916, at the age of 53, Moore died by a self-inflicted gun wound on Wooded Island in Jackson Park, Chicago. He had visited the island regularly to observe and study birds. Moore had struggled for many years with an unspecified illness and chronic pain from an abdominal operation for gallstones, in 1911. He had also expressed continuing despondency at human indifference towards the suffering of their fellow animals. In a suicide note found on his body by a police officer, he had written:
  The long struggle is ended. I must pass away. Good-by. Oh, men are so cold and hard and half conscious toward their suffering fellows. Nobody understands. O my mother, and O my little girl! What will become of you? And the poor four-footed! May the long years be merciful! Take me to my river. There, where the wild birds sing and the waters go on and on, alone in my groves, forever. O, Tess, forgive me. O, forgive me, please!
  His brother-in-law, Clarence Darrow, delivered a eulogy at Moore's funeral, describing him as having died while "suffering under a temporary fit of sanity" and as having been a "dead dreamer"; the eulogy was later published. Moore was buried in Excelsior Cemetery, Mitchell County, Kansas.
caption: Jackson Park, Chicago's Wooded Island during the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893; the site of Moore's death in 1916
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